All Poo-Poos Must Go!

I’ve already discussed my four year old’s penchant for holding it in until he’s ready to fucking explode, but last night he took a different approach to things. A couple of hours before his annual daycare Christmas Recital (which could more accurately be described as the annual Sit In A High School Auditorium While A Bunch Of Toddlers Forget The Lyrics To Jingle Bells Recital), he decided that it would not be in his best interest to suffer through an acute episode of I’ve Got To Poo! on stage, and so he told me, “Daddy, I’m going to get the poo-poos out before I go on stage tonight!”

You wouldn’t think that you would ever react to the news that someone was going to take a shit with such unbridled happiness, but when my four year old holds it, he fucking holds it, so I was thrilled. It’s hard for us to tell if he’s pooped during the day because he’s at day care during the week and when the kids are four, the teachers have lost interest in shit-tracking activities. He’ll also go through periods where pooping isn’t an issue and we’ll just start to forget about it when all of a sudden he’ll decide that pooping is for losers again, and we’ll only find out days later when he has an explosive emergency evacuation (an EEE). So when he told me that he was going to voluntarily take a dump, I reacted as if he had just told me that he found a million dollars in his toy box.

Seriously, it’s a real fucking problem with this kid. One week, the people at day care informed me that he hadn’t been himself lately, and that he was listless, not enthusiastic about playing, and often asked to go to sleep (which he never wants to do). He had no fever, no cough, runny nose or anything. He just felt… Blah. So we took him to the doctor who discovered that his entire GI tract was jam packed with shit. “Oh yeah, that’ll cause his symptoms for sure.” So we had to go home and give him an enema, which caused him to produce a piece of work that clogged the toilet. He’s four, he shouldn’t be able to clog a toilet all by himself.

My son, scourge of potties everywhere.

So I placed him on the potty with suitable words of encouragement usually heard in the context of someone who is about to attempt a game winning field goal in the Super Bowl. “You can do it, buddy! Just concentrate, get it done, and then we’ll celebrate!” I left the room and went into my room just down the hall where I spent the next fifteen minutes listening to my four year old yell at his ass:

“C’mon poo-poo! Get out of there!”

“All poo-poos out of my butt RIGHT NOW!”

“All poo-poos must go!”

It was absolutely hilarious. Finally, after a lot of pleading, it got quiet. Really quiet. I started wondering if maybe he’d got tired of trying to shit and just waddled off to play Nintendo, so I took a quick peek in the bathroom. He was still in there all right, his face a shade of red so deep it was alarming. His face was vermillion. So I quickly backed off and let him do what he had to do. Seconds later, a loud depth charge announced his success, followed shortly by, “Wow! … … … DADDY! I WENT POO POO!”

I was so proud.

I’m so proud of you, son. Almost as proud as the time you talked a bunch of poo-poos out of your ass.

For those of you who have yet to experience the wonder of parenthood, you’re probably thinking to yourself, “When I have kids, there’s no way in hell that I’m going to tell shit stories. I mean, gross! Who wants to hear that?” You’re wrong. When you become a parent, you find yourself doing all sorts of inexplicable things.

First of all, you quickly forget how difficult life is with a newborn in the house. On one level, you’ll acknowledge that you went seemingly forever without getting more than 90 minutes of sleep at a time (if you’re lucky), but you won’t really remember how horrible it was. Same with a baby with a “fussy stomach” who won’t stop howling for hours. Ditto a child that can’t keep his lunch down, a kid with alarmingly high fevers, a baby that turns blue all of a sudden, etc. I’m not saying that it doesn’t all work out in the end, but there are a lot of aspects of early parenthood that seriously fucking blow. And your mind will conveniently forget all of these things because evolution has hard-wired you that way. If women didn’t forget how shitty it was to be heavily pregnant, the pain of childbirth, the lack of sleep, etc., they’d stab the next guy that tried to sleep with them right in the balls, and then where would the human race be?

Likewise, parenthood damages the part of your brain that normally prevents you from talking about your child’s defecatory habits in front of foreign dignitaries at White House dinners. Not only will you find yourself talking about your child’s adventures in Pottyland, you will find yourself expecting other people to be interested in these stories, even if you’re telling them these tales while they’re eating fudge.

So sorry if you didn’t feel like reading about the shits my four year old takes, especially if you’re eating fudge right now. But I am totally unable to resist a story in which my youngest starts having a conversation with his ass. As a parent, the only story more interesting to me would be if his ass started talking back.